Books like Great Expectations

01

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · Historical fiction

A Tale of Two Cities is set against the French Revolution and follows three intertwined characters: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his title and family legacy; Lucie Manette, the daughter of a man who spent eighteen years imprisoned in the Bastille; and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who loves Lucie without hope and knows he will never be the man Darnay already is.

02

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · Classics

David Copperfield is the novel Dickens called his "favourite child" — a first-person bildungsroman that tracks David from a motherless childhood in Suffolk through blacking-factory misery (barely disguised autobiography), education, early work in London, two marriages, and eventual literary success.

03

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

04

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · Memoir

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before Plath's death.

05

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · History

All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

06

Bleak House

Charles Dickens · Classics

Bleak House is organized around the interminable Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce — a legal dispute over a will that has been grinding through the Court of Chancery for decades, consuming the fortunes and lives of everyone attached to it.